In a room at the back of her house, Vera Alves da Silva Oliveira keeps the air-conditioning on day and night to protect bags of seeds gathered by hand from Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savannah.
Oliveira is one of more than 700 seed gatherers in the Xingu Seeds Network working to help recover forests and savannas across Mato Grosso, a major agricultural state.
Forest restoration is slowly taking root in Brazil, backed by civil society networks, businesses and increased funding, after the government pledged to restore 12 million hectares of natural areas by 2030 as part of its climate goals under the Paris Agreement of 2015.
Photo: AP
Yet 2024 was the worst year on record for global tropical forest loss, with Brazil accounting for 42 percent of the destruction after losing 2.82 million hectares, mostly due to fires, data from research group World Resources Institute showed.
Wildfires seldom occur spontaneously in the Amazon, with most blazes set by farmers and land-grabbers.
“One day I went to look for my seeds, and when I got there — my God, there was not a single branch left. Everything had been ripped out,” said Oliveira while working in her courtyard in the city of Nova Xavantina in central Brazil.
Photo: AFP
“We get so sad, because what are you going to do to restore all of that?” she said as she placed seeds in a machine and pulled a lever to press and break the shells.
ALTERNATIVE TO SEEDLINGS
Members of the Xingu Seeds Network, who are mostly women from farms, cities, villages and vast Indigenous territories, are fighting biodiversity and tree loss in areas where cattle pastures and soybean and grain fields are expanding.
The network of collectors, who often travel miles to find species and are paid by the weight of what they gather, was founded in 2007 in response to a call by Indigenous communities in the Xingu River basin on farmers to save the area’s drying streams.
It promotes an alternative to planting seedlings that is called muvuca, which involves sowing a mix of native seeds that gives plants best adapted to the local environment a chance to thrive.
Research has shown that muvuca is significantly cheaper than planting seedlings and does not require irrigation.
Part of an alliance of 27 seed-collecting groups, the Xingu Seeds Network has helped to regrow 10,800 hectares of forests and savannahs.
But these initiatives are a long way from countering the rapid rate of deforestation in the Amazon and Brazil’s other ecosystems.
“In just one month, my neighbor alone cut down what we had restored in 10 years,” said Bruna Dayanna Ferreira, director of the Xingu Seeds Network.
CLIMATE-CHANGE BUFFER
Restoring natural areas helps capture carbon, and releases water vapor that helps form clouds that reflect sunlight, produce rain and cool the air.
That buffers the effects of global warming and protects rainforests from drying and reaching tipping points after which they may become savannah-like ecosystems, scientists have said.
Since 2021, the area of forests, savannahs and other ecosystems restored by planting seeds or seedlings in Brazil has increased by 160 percent.
That currently amounts to just 204,000 hectares, of which 19 percent was in the Amazon, figures from the non-profit Brazilian Restoration Observatory showed in December.
Areas undergoing natural regeneration, when nature regrows without human intervention, are far vaster, totaling 19 million hectares, according to the observatory.
But tropical forests need an average of 20 years to regain 80 percent of the carbon stored before they were cleared. A 2021 study showed that recovering Amazon forest areas are destroyed after an average of eight years of regrowth.
The government’s National Native Vegetation Recovery Plan in November identified 3.5 million hectares of forests, savannahs and other ecosystems regrowing in land subject to environmental protections, where they have a bigger chance of surviving.
“Most restoration is happening through secondary (naturally regrowing) forests ... and we need monitoring and policies to protect those areas,” said Thiago Belote Silva, forest director at the Environment Ministry.
FOREST INCENTIVES
With human-assisted restoration still gaining pace, the amount of seeds that members of the Xingu Seeds Network are able to collect outstrips demand for planting, said Ferreira.
“Our capacity to collect seeds is much bigger than the demand we get, and this is the rule among all seed-collecting networks in Brazil,” she said.
Even though natural regrowth is the quickest path to large-scale recovery, promoting restoration as a market can help shift incentives away from deforestation, Belote said.
“We have to think of large-scale restoration as a source of income ... to show that it’s competitive against deforestation,” he said.
The government’s Restoring the Amazon project has awarded 274 million reais (US$50 million) since last year to restore 7,980 hectares in Indigenous territories and plots of public land allocated to smallholder farmers.
Part of that investment will go to plant forests to produce food, including acai berries and cocoa, which are native to the Amazon.
That funding pales in comparison to the US$207 billion in publicly subsidized credit to agricultural production that drives forest loss in Brazil over the last decade, according to the Forests & Finance watchdog.
Along the road to Nova Xavantina city stand towering silos and an air-conditioned warehouse whose owner said have room for up to 450,000 bags of soybeans for planting — a potent symbol of the dominance of monoculture in this region.
Yet the nascent restoration market is already transforming the lives of its practitioners.
Oliveira, who worked as a housekeeper before joining the Xingu Seeds Network in 2012, said her income from seed collection has helped her family build three small houses and buy a motorcycle and car.
Working in nature has also helped her cope with the depression she suffers.
“I’m most at ease when it’s time to collect,” she said.
Feb. 9 to Feb.15 Growing up in the 1980s, Pan Wen-li (潘文立) was repeatedly told in elementary school that his family could not have originated in Taipei. At the time, there was a lack of understanding of Pingpu (plains Indigenous) peoples, who had mostly assimilated to Han-Taiwanese society and had no official recognition. Students were required to list their ancestral homes then, and when Pan wrote “Taipei,” his teacher rejected it as impossible. His father, an elder of the Ketagalan-founded Independence Presbyterian Church in Xinbeitou (自立長老會新北投教會), insisted that their family had always lived in the area. But under postwar
On paper, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) enters this year’s nine-in-one elections with almost nowhere to go but up. Yet, there are fears in the pan-green camp that they may not do much better then they did in 2022. Though the DPP did somewhat better at the city and county councillor level in 2022, at the “big six” municipality mayoral and county commissioner level, it was a disaster for the party. Then-president and party chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made a string of serious strategic miscalculations that led to the party’s worst-ever result at the top executive level. That year, the party
In 2012, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) heroically seized residences belonging to the family of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “purchased with the proceeds of alleged bribes,” the DOJ announcement said. “Alleged” was enough. Strangely, the DOJ remains unmoved by the any of the extensive illegality of the two Leninist authoritarian parties that held power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. If only Chen had run a one-party state that imprisoned, tortured and murdered its opponents, his property would have been completely safe from DOJ action. I must also note two things in the interests of completeness.
Taiwan is especially vulnerable to climate change. The surrounding seas are rising at twice the global rate, extreme heat is becoming a serious problem in the country’s cities, and typhoons are growing less frequent (resulting in droughts) but more destructive. Yet young Taiwanese, according to interviewees who often discuss such issues with this demographic, seldom show signs of climate anxiety, despite their teachers being convinced that humanity has a great deal to worry about. Climate anxiety or eco-anxiety isn’t a psychological disorder recognized by diagnostic manuals, but that doesn’t make it any less real to those who have a chronic and
RSS